Michael Kors: Kors celebre

Since bringing his company back from the brink 20 years ago, the designer Michael Kors has been keeping his investors, his customers and his models happy. Lisa Armstrong meets the American design legend.

Among the modern designer's career requirements - stamina, photo-friendliness, media savvy, extreme focus and a rhino-like armour against the slings and arrows of critics - empathy ranks low. This, thinks Michael Kors, is why all too often, even after all the size-zero furore, 'you still see a skeletal model on the catwalk sometimes. There are designers who think it's ironic. Or maybe they just don't want to be told what to do. Or - and this is worse - they think it's boring to do something that looks beautiful. Well, last time I heard, pretty wasn't a dirty word.'

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You will not see cadavers on a Kors catwalk. You will see Carmen Kass, the blond, rangy 33-year-old Estonian model who was huge in the Noughties, or Arizona Muse, the brunette 23-year-old mother-of-one who is huge now. Kors came of age in the era of supermodels. He likes the women in his shows to look sexy, healthy and bronzed, basking in unashamedly sleek, rich-looking clothes. Radically, he also likes his models to smile.

'I get asked all the time how it is the girls look happy in my shows. It's because I spend aaaages thinking about which outfit will suit them best. Sometimes I'll try a girl in seven, eight, nine looks before I hit the right one for her. People say, but Michael, they're models, they can wear anything. Wrong. There's one great model who has really short legs.' His voice, which shares the exuberant cadences of Alan Carr but with deeper, American inflections, dips conspiratorially. He won't reveal names. Suffice to say, she is the one he never puts in trousers. 'You can see when women - and that includes models, by the way - feel good in what they're wearing. Their posture changes. And so does their mood.'

Kors, for the record, is wearing white jeans, black T-shirt and jacket (the other way round, he once memorably opined, makes you look like a waiter), gold Rolex, flapjack-coloured tan and smoothly cherubic face. It must be a winning combo, since his mood is generally on the ebullient to ecstatic spectrum, even on a day like today, when he has just flown from a mini break with his husband, Lance ('I love mini breaks. Mini breaks save my sanity'), in Capri, where it poured with rain, to a full day of interviews with international press people who have jetted into Madrid to witness his newest store opening.

If you were to pick a spot on the globe where there was a desperate need for a fancy new Kors store, selling clothes that weave the disparate elements of the great American narrative - from Navajo and cowgirl to Babe Paley and Gatsby - into a sleek, wealthy uptown New Yorker-in-boom-times package, Madrid, a city with 25 per cent youth unemployment and demonstrations a go-go, would perhaps not be your first choice. But 10 days in, business is booming.

'Coats. They can't get enough coats,' Kors states. 'I said, "In May? It's 26 degrees." But they love the drama of a coat. And cocktail dresses. They must be doing a lot of parties here.'

Business is booming in general for Michael Kors.

The day before his autumn/winter show in New York last February, the share price of his recently floated company rose 27 per cent. His models were not the only ones beaming on the catwalk. Last year the company turned over $1.3 billion, a rise of more than 60 per cent on the previous year. It has been expanding exponentially since 2002, when it was recording about $30 million of sales a year. 'Isn't it crazy? In a decade of financial catastrophe, from 9/11 and Sars to the banking collapse, things have only gone upward.'

It is particularly crazy considering that in 1990 his business was in Chapter 11, the US equivalent of going into administration. 'With hindsight, I can see that I was pretty parochial. I sold a bit in Canada and London and I thought with that, and all the omen I knew in New York and LA, I could have a comfortable business.' Given that the kind of women who were attracted to his glossy, refined version of American sportswear were impeccably dressed, high-spending socialites such as Nan Kempner, or supermodels like Elle Macpherson, he could be forgiven for having wanted to keep things cosy. 'In those days I got everything made around the corner from my office in the Garment District,' he says.

Being hired by LVMH to overhaul the Céline label in the mid-1990s was the wake-up call he needed. 'Suddenly I had to confront the possibility that not everyone in the world wanted to wear camel and grey flannel in November; that the way a woman in Sydney dresses for work might not be the same as a woman in New York. Women travel and there's a degree of conformity, but still, what works in London in the damp doesn't necessarily do it for the Singaporeans.'

By 2002 he was also a judge on Project Runway, a television reality show now in its 10th year. Kors's biting but not bitchy wit and his status within the fashion industry gave it a credibility and glamour the British version lacked. It in turn made him a household name. 'We've been on longer than The Lucy Show. Isn't that insane?'

With the right mental attitude, a proven product and mounting fame, all Kors needed for global domination was some deep-pocketed backers. Silas Chou and Lawrence Stroll had had spectacular success at Tommy Hilfiger, and equally spectacular disaster at Asprey.

In 2003 they bought 51 per cent of the business; Kors retained 12 per cent. The combination was perfect: an era hungry for slick, well-made clothes that looked expensive without being vulgar, a business duo that knew how to take a brand to new markets and a designer who knew not only how to design but also how to sell.

Boy, did Kors know how to sell. At the age of 11 he opened a shop in his parents' basement in Long Island, New York, selling tie-dye bags and batik clothes he had made. At 16 he had a nice business selling his sketches to a jeans line. A boy with expensive tastes, he blew all the profits on a Cartier Tank watch. But more even than the shop, it was his contribution to his mother Joan's second wedding dress, when he was five, that suggested any career other than one where he would devote himself to making women feel better about their appearance was out of the question.

A former model, Joan had eloped for her first wedding and wanted to make things right with her mother second time around. 'Hence the horrendous dress,' Kors says. 'Because actually my mom had great taste.' It's not strictly true that her son designed the outfit, but he definitely redesigned it.

'What happened was that she came into the room in this thing absolutely smothered in bows and my grandmother's saying beautiful, beautiful, and there's me, aged five, practically gagging in the corner.' It's amazing one so young should have such resolute minimalist vision. Even more amazing to come across a mother who would listen. The bows were removed, 'all 750 of them'. And yes, the result was much improved. In fact, it did better than the short-lived marriage (to Bill Kors, from whom Michael, born Karl Anderson, took his last name; he had already decided at the age of five that he preferred Michael to Karl).

By the time he was 17 he was working for Lothar's, an upmarket boutique on 57th Street in Manhattan, where Dawn Mello spotted him in the window, halfway up a ladder. A former child model who had been in ads for cereal and loo paper, Kors, with his halo of blond curls, now somewhat depleted, must have been an arresting sight. But it was his clothes that grabbed Mello. A woman of peerless taste, who was then working at Bergdorf Goodman and later went to Gucci, where she hired a young Tom Ford, Mello was struck by the display Kors had been working on, and even more so when he revealed that he was also the designer, merchandise director, manager, sales assistant and chief coffee maker. Mello invited him to show his collection to the buying team at Bergdorf, then - and now - America's most prestigious department store. He agreed, even though he did not actually have a complete collection, and the next day he and his mother turned up to present and model the clothes.

Kors still loves selling, even if the trunk show, the personal-appearance-cum-shopping-event at which he excelled, is no longer as common as it was in the 1980s and 90s when it launched many an American designer's career, though none quite as successfully as his. 'Twitter's the new trunk show,' he observes. 'I get women posting pictures of themselves all the time and asking me what I think.' Or he will get a client soliciting his advice on the phone from the changing-room of another designer. He loves selling so much, he will even encourage her to spend on another brand. 'When I was in my teens and twenties I was a mad, crazy shopper. I understand that rush. I know what the rustle of tissue paper does to the pulse. I get the promise of transformation. I know,' he adds, looking wistfully at his black-clad stomach, 'what it's like to want to look thinner.'

He is constantly telling customers not to be so hard on themselves. 'I had one woman trying on a swimsuit that Carmen [Kass] had worn in the show, feeling miserable because it didn't look the same. I said, first of all, you have three kids, second, you haven't been spray-tanned to within an inch of your life, and thirdly, excuse me for noticing, but you're north of 40, not a supermodel who's been playing soccer since she was six.'

He is learning, too, how to make life more pleasant for himself in this post-designer-meltdown era, hence the mini-breaks and the house he shares with Lance on Water Island, a tiny speck off Long Island where there are no cars or even bikes. 'I look back to the early 1990s when I thought I was busy and wonder what I did with myself. I suppose I had time to daydream. Now no one does that. Even tiny kids are scheduled. I'm so glad I'm not a designer starting out now. I've had 30 years to build the stamina.'

When he launched in 1981, he had one line and three collections a year. Now there are three lines: Michael Kors Collection, MICHAEL by Michael Kors and Kors by Michael Kors, for which prices are surprisingly reasonable. 'That's because while the shoes are all Italian-made for the main collection, the second lines are a mixture of Italian materials and Far East manufacturing.' He thinks even his wealthiest clients are grateful for the cost consideration. 'They're in shock at some of the prices. I mean, let's be honest, designer clothes have always been expensive. Those women like Babe Paley were not dressing impeccably on the cheap. But in the boom era things got so noisy that you had to keep ramping up your design. Then came the internet and people felt the only way a shoe could be noticed was if you designed it in turquoise alligator with a pink sequinned bow, a heel made from vermicelli and a platform that was an aquarium. And guess what, that's a shoe that costs £2,000.'

Kors's own bestselling shoe, it should be noted, is the Berkley T Strap, which costs £110 and has sold more than 500,000 so far. 'We couldn't work out why. I mean it's a good shoe. You can walk in it, and by the way, the shoe you can't walk in, the dress you can't sit down in, the bag that's so heavy you can't put more than a lipstick in it - that's all over. But still, we were mystified. Then we discovered that it's the bat mitzvah shoe. Every 13-year-old girl in New York and LA had it.'

The real trick today, he thinks, is to design clothes that are sexy but not vulgar, youthful but not ridiculous, simple but exciting… He chuckles ruefully at the impossible paradoxes before perking up, because really, it all comes back to empathy.

'You know what? If women didn't demand all those things, my job would be boring.'

KORS LAWS

• The difference between chic, style and elegance is that elegance has nothing to do with clothes. It's about the way you move, how you gesticulate or use your hands. Chic is style but with a wink. It's that quality that makes you look at a person and think, I wish I'd thought of that.
• If ever a customer in the public eye tells me she is worried about wearing an expensive dress more than once, I tell her to stop fretting. Nan Kempner used to wear her clothes over and over. It's a sign you actually own rather than borrowed them. That's chic. Same with jewellery. Oprah and Barbra Streisand - they're about the only women in Hollywood who actually own their jewellery.
• I will forever love classics, but you need to recalibrate them. For instance, a trench coat has to be a bit small or too big. The right size looks too Madame. Something that looks as though it belongs to your husband is more youthful. And try replacing the soft tie belt with a leather one. We've all done that Ingrid Bergman look.
• A Little Black Dress. Can't fail - except if you put it next to a Little White Dress or a Little Metallic Dress. It's kinder on the skin, too.
• Women always seem to want to know what it is that Kate Moss does. But it's because she never looks completely perfect. It's not too done. She always mixes something familiar with the unfamiliar. That's what keeps it interesting without looking ridiculous.
• Get things altered. It makes all the difference. Even if it's high street. Especially if it's high street.
• True luxury today isn't in bling. It's in small everyday things. It's a bowl of perfect strawberries or a cashmere sweater, beautifully made, that you use every day. That old business of saving things for best is over. Luxury that sits on a shelf isn't luxury.
• When is too old for leather skinny trousers? Nan Kempner wore them in her 70s. Our bestselling dress this winter is leather and lace. It has no obvious practicality other than it makes women feel good and it works in just about every situation. It's about the body and the attitude. If you're worrying about your underwear, don't do it.
• Appropriate is an undervalued quality today but I think it's coming back and maybe Kate Middleton's had a lot to do with it. She makes appropriate youthful - and you'll notice she never resorts to a pastel skirt suit.
• As a rule, I don't ever say never. But jeggings are the exception. You mean your skinny jeans aren't skinny enough?
• Don't get hung up on height. I have a Japanese assistant who's 4ft 11in. She hardly ever wears heels but she looks great. And she wears long. You can break the rules if you're confident. It's a myth that heels are the only way forward for a shorter woman. Really high heels can look completely out of proportion - and proportions are much more important than dimensions. If you have short legs, you need to give the illusion of a raised waist.
• Always add one unexpected item to your look. Elle Macpherson wears flat sandals and surfer bracelets with her red-carpet dresses. She's not really a ball dress woman, but when she wears them her way she looks terrific. It's about being true to who you are and learning to express yourself through what you wear.